Sydney Festival: All Wear Bowlers and The Tiger Lillies at The Studio, Sydney Opera House, until Saturday January 21.
These are two of the 7 "cutting-edge works from the ridiculous to the sublime" in the About an Hour program. I can see why festival director Fergus Linehan chose the British "art" cabaret The Tiger Lillies because of their cult reputation overseas. I found them shallow - ridiculous.
But All Wear Bowlers by Philadelphians Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford was close to sublime.
The Lillies' Masturbation Jim song was rated his favourite by one 30-ish groupie I overheard, but to compare such work with Weill and Brecht, or to pretend that it's a satire of that tradition, as the publicity does, is just not on. Falsetto singing about killing babies - and bashing drums with dolls - is weak undergraduate humour - quite puerile.
The claim that All Wear Bowlers has "the pathos of Laurel and Hardy, the desolate humour of Samuel Beckett" and, I would add, the skill of Charlie Chaplin and the imagination of Woody Allen, is all true.
Two silent movie bowler hatted tramps fall off the film screen, as in The Rose of Cairo, onto the stage where they have no choice but to entertain us. Their clowning in a state of steadily increasing disorientation takes us along with them until we realise that, like them, we all wear the clown's bowler hat.
Sobelle and Lyford trained with vaudeville consultant David Shiner of Cirque du Soleil, and the quality in their timing and characterisations shines through. They made fun of pretentious art - "all those layers" - then through our laughter gave us true art with many levels of meaning.
I saw Bowlers first on Wednesday evening - a pity perhaps, because their sublimity only served to highlight the pretentiousness of the Tiger Lillies an hour later.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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